Part 1, Chapter 1

Watch Chapter 1 of JFK Part 1. By the time he came of age, John Fitzgerald Kennedy inhabited a world of special exemption: the family estate in suburban New York, the summer compound in Hyannis Port, the winter retreat in Palm Beach. The story of his family's heroic multi-generational rise from the want of Irish famine might well have been a misty old folktale. The past was not the point in the Kennedy household.

About the Film

My American Experience

Who is your favorite 20th-century American president? Was it Reagan? Kennedy? Clinton? Or one of the other 14 men who helped usher the United States through the 1900s? Who do you think was the most influential?